What She Knew
by Spartangal22
Summary: Rosita finds Abraham before the party at Alexandria, and has a problem with his wardrobe. The real problem, of course, goes much deeper than a tie. A character exploration of Rosita, how she ended up where she did, and what she lost in the process.


"I've never seen you in a tie." Abraham looked up from where he sat on the bed, him and his tie, brown and white and completely wrong. "It's too short," Rosita said.

Abraham pulled at it, as if trying to stretch it out. "This was all they had," he said with a shrug. "It was this or nothing."

 _Then why wear it at all?_ Rosita wanted to ask him, but she kept her mouth shut. It had never occurred to her that Abraham would be the kind of man who liked ties, but maybe he was. Maybe his kids bought him one every year on Father's Day and he made a point of wearing it whenever he wasn't on base. Maybe his wife even ironed it for him.

Rosita could never do that for him, even if Alexandria had irons. Which it probably did. _It has everything else,_ she thought, and she didn't allow herself to wonder why that made her so depressed. She'd always been hopeless with household chore, all the traditionally feminine things she should have known. She'd had no one there to teach her. Hand her a wrench and she could fix the sink, or give her a pick and she could jimmy a lock, but the one time she tried to iron, she'd burned a hole right through her dress pants. Mateo had laughed so hard soda, came right out of his nose. Rosita hadn't thought it funny, though. She'd had a college interview that afternoon, and all she had to wear were the dress pants or...

Mateo laughed even harder when she came downstairs in a dress. That time, she'd shut him up with a quick punch to the gut. "You look beautiful, Rosie," her father told her, but she'd huffed and stormed out of the house.

Apparently the interviewer agreed with him, though. His eyes lingered on her long, tan legs when she'd introduced herself, and Rosita remembered making a point of crossing and uncrossing her legs the rest of the afternoon. When her acceptance letter arrived two months later, she liked to think that pretty pink dress had something to do with it.

She brought it with her to the university, but she never did wear it again. Her roommate, Rachel, with her bright blonde curls and tight pink skirts, borrowed the dress for a party the first weekend on campus and Rosita never got it back. Not that she cared. Rachel took her shopping often enough, to Rosita's chagrin. Rosita retaliated by bringing her home on Sundays to watch football with her family.

Mateo liked Rachel. A lot. It came as no surprise when, halfway through sophomore year, her brother asked her best friend out to dinner. It came as less of a surprise when, halfway through their junior year, Rachel tearfully told her she was pregnant. What _did_ come as a surprise was when, halfway through their senior year, they announced their engagement.

Rosita wore a blue dress to the wedding, the second time she'd worn it. The first had been to another interview, for another college, halfway across the country. By the time of the wedding, she'd already been accepted, and as she hugged her new sister-in-law, she was already preparing to say goodbye. She'd purchased her plane ticket that morning. The next stop: the rest of her life.

She never quite made it. Dad got sick, and Mat lost his job, and Rosita decided that school could wait. Her family needed her _there_ , not "just a telephone call a way," so she asked the university to hold her spot a semester and they agreed.

They weren't so generous the second time, though, and when spring arrived and things hadn't improved, Rosita told them to give her spot away. She'd apply again for the next year, she told herself, even though she knew she wouldn't. Her father was still sick, Mat was making $13.27 an hour as a paramedic, and Rachel was pregnant again, so Rosita took a full-time job at the bank downtown, just a block away from the hospital. "It's just for a little while," she told her dad when he protested. "Just until things have settled down."

But then one year turned into two, and Rosita forgot all about her second degree. Her world was numbers, now - blood pressure charts and hospital bills, accounts, stocks, and the ages of her two nephews who spent Sundays in her apartment. She wore a dress to work everyday now, black and ironed - by Rachel, not by her - and a white sweater over it, no matter the weather. The bank was always freezing. That was one of many things Rosita hated about it.

She hated the desk she worked at, and the lack of windows. She hated her coworker, Kyle, who hit on her when she got her coffee every morning (she hated the coffee, too, but she wasn't paying $2.17 for it at Starbucks.) But she liked its proximity to the hospital, and that she could walk to work instead of taking a bus, and the economy was a mess right now so she wasn't about to quit.

She was at the bank when the world went to hell. There was a video going viral about some dead guy in LA who stood up after he'd been shot half a dozen times, but Rosita wrote that off as a hoax. People could manipulate anything on the Internet. But when Timothy Oldbrick - a regular - dropped dead in the middle of the bank for no apparent reason, failed to be revived by the paramedics, then grabbed one and bit his face off while the rest of them watched? That wasn't a hoax.

Looking back on it, Rosita didn't understand the chaos and the rioting. If everyone had just stayed calm and took care of themselves, things could have gone smoothly, or, at least, smoother. When Mr. Oldbrick tore into the poor paramedic, and the clients crowded the door, and her co-workers screamed, Rosita took the back exit and headed straight for the hospital. The nurse on the 4th floor pain management clinic hardly heard Rosita when she said she was taking her father home. Her father, half asleep, hardly seemed to realize what was going on either.

"Get _up!_ " Rosita ordered, pulling him into a wheelchair with one hand and holding her cell phone to her ear with the other. "What? No, not you, Mat. Where are you? Never mind. Come home - come _on_ , dad! Get Rachel and the kids and come to my apartment. Shut up, Mat. Your overtime's not going to matter. I'm not arguing. I'm calling Rachel."

Rachel didn't pick up the phone. Rosita dialed over and over as she pushed her father into the elevator and waited impatiently as it clicked down the floors. She needn't have been impatient, though. They were the only people leaving the building. Weeks later, Rosita would wonder why more people hadn't been there that day, collecting their loved ones. She wondered if they regretted that later, when the hospital was bombed, and she wondered if they had been right to let them die peacefully there, shielded from the chaos of the world gone mad.

Mateo was so mad when he arrived at her apartment. "I thought you called her!" He shouted when he realized his wife wasn't there. "Dios mio, Rosie, Al's sick! I thought you said she'd be here!"

Rosita had just finished getting her father into her bed, and she slumped down on the couch, exhausted. "She didn't pick up the phone."

"Well, I'm going to get her."

Rosita ran a hand through her hair. Her ponytail had fallen apart hours ago. "It's not safe, Mat. That video wasn't a hoax."

"I know." He paused, staring at her with wide eyes. "I saw a woman die today, Rosie. Except...she didn't die. Her heart stopped and everything, and we called were putting her in a body bag and suddenly she was clawing at it, trying to get out. We thought we must have gotten it wrong, so we opened it up, and…" He swallowed hard, crossed the room into three swift steps, and pulled Rosita up into a tight hug. "I love you. And Dad. Tell him for me when he wakes up, will you?"

"You can tell him when you come back," Rosita said, pulling away from her big brother. "He'll be happy to see the kids."

Mateo nodded, running a hand through his hair and looking down. "Yeah. Just tell him for me."

Mat never made it back to the apartment. The riots started that night, and Rosita barricaded the apartment door. After the riots came the quiet, and it took Rosita longer than she liked to admit to work up the courage to step outside her door. She didn't have a gun, but she also didn't have any more bottled water. "I'm coming back, dad," she told her father, but he hardly seemed to hear her. He was in pain, and she needed to find him medicine. _Painkillers, water, Mat, Rachel, and the boys_. That was her to-do list. _And a gun._

She tried to prepare herself for what she would see outside when she stepped into the hall, but how could she? How could she be ready to find Mrs. Peterson's half-eaten body three doors down? How could she be ready for the blood on the walls and on the floor, or how it would feel when she stepped into it, how warm it would be on the door handle? How could she be ready for the bullet holes in the brick of her building, or the broken glass in the yard, or the abandoned cars, and the moans? God, the moans. Why did they have to make that sound?

Mat and his family lived 12 miles from her house, a 15-minute car ride. Walking there was the longest day of her life. She didn't sleep, she didn't eat, and for all her panic, she didn't come across another creature, living or otherwise, the entire way there. The area was wiped out completely. At one point, she passed a sign, reading "Government Safe Haven," with a large arrow beneath it, but the sign was trampled on the ground so whichever way it would have sent her, she didn't know. She hoped Mat had seen it when it was still upright.

She knew almost instantly he hadn't when she arrived on Kensington Drive and saw the front door of his house ajar. There was a shoe in the front lawn, and Rachel's pretty pink shirt was covered in blood, her intestines spilling out and onto the kitchen floor.

Rosita vomited. She didn't look for Mateo, or Al, or Julian. She never regretted not looking. Her last memory of her brother was his hug and his parting words; she was glad she hadn't seen him mangled or moaning. It was better that way.

She knew, because that was how she found her father when she made it back. Ambling mindlessly in her apartment, dragging himself across the floor, too weak, even in death, to stand. Part of her knew what she was going to find even as she made her way up the apartment stairs because, when she opened the door and saw him on his belly in her kitchen, she didn't bat an eye. She didn't cry as she plunged her knife into his skull, or when she covered him with a blanket, or when she gathered up some supplies and left the apartment for the last time, heading out on her own to who-knew-where.

She survived six days on her own before meeting up with Frank and Olive. They were older, mid-thirties, a newly married couple whose honeymoon had gone to hell. Frank was a teacher and Olive was a chef; they told her that as if it was still relevant. But Frank could hunt and Olive made a mean rabbit stew, and Rosita found a gun in an empty police car and the three of them were a pretty good team. They didn't have a real goal in mind, just staying alive, and for a while, that was enough. It _had_ to be enough, Rosita told herself when she thought about it, because it was all they had.

And then she met Abraham. They ventured too far into a city looking for ammo and water (they were forever running out of water. Rosita picked up a book on that excursion about how to purify their own) and they ran into horde of dead ones. Rosita scoffed at that idea now; the pack they'd found was probably 12 or 14 total, gigantic at the time, but nothing compared to what they would face later. Still, it was a formidable challenge, and the toughest one they'd come across to that point, and the adrenaline started flowing instead. Rosita killed two with two bullets, and another with her knife, but a scream to her left told her that they'd reached Frank. A quick look told her that Olive was going to his side even though he was long past saving, and Rosita was suddenly scared - not scared of the dead ones, she could handle them, but scared that she'd once again be on her own.

Then, out of nowhere, a red-haired giant came swooping in, yelling at the top of his lungs and firing like a madman, and everything that should have been dead suddenly was. "Damn these bastards," he shouted, stomping one's head in that dared still move.

"Could you keep it _down_?" Rosita hissed, taking a step towards him and pushing him back. "You're gonna bring more out."

He smiled wide, the first of many times he would send that look her way. "Let 'em come."

He was insane, that much was clear, but there was something oddly charming about the glint in his eye that Rosita couldn't quite keep from smiling, and that was all the encouragement he needed. "Abraham Ford," he announced gruffly, stuffing his gun into his belt loop and thrusting out a hand for her to shake. "Man back there in the shadows is Eugene."

Rosita looked beyond Abraham and saw that there was, indeed, a man lurking in the corner across the road. Even from a distance, he looked rotund. "I didn't even see him."

"He don't look like much, but he's gonna save us all," Abraham told her, his voice suddenly serious. "I'm gonna make sure of that." He looked her up and down, the glint returning to his eye as it wandered past her, to the bodies she'd put on the ground. "You do that? Damn, girl. Little thing like you? We've got a group of nine of us going to D.C. They're scavenging around the block. None of them are fighters, though." He looked her straight in the eye. "You wanna come with us? We could use a girl like you."

It took him three weeks to kiss her, and he was oddly shy about it. He brought her to an abandoned Italian restaurant, where he'd set up a candle light dinner - canned tuna and spray cheese - and he had a flower for her. "What took you so long?" She'd asked, laughing, when they parted. He looked away, and if she'd had to describe him at the moment, she would have said he looked guilty, which made no sense to her. (It wasn't until later that she found out about the wife and kids he'd already lost.)

"I wasn't sure what a pretty, young girl like you would think of an old soldier like me trying to court ya," he admitted. Rosita snorted.

"The only time I think of you as old is when you use words like 'court' when you really mean 'screw,'" she told him.

He looked up quickly. "That's not what I mean."

"It's not?" She asked, raising an eyebrow. "Guess I'll be leaving then."

She didn't leave.

It wasn't much more than that for Rosita, not at first. Abraham had taken it much more seriously. But she warmed up to him, came to appreciate him for more than just comfort during the night. It was funny, in a sad sort of way, that this world that had taken away her old life had given her this one, for the old Rosita would never have met Abraham. Even if she had, she never would have learned to love him.

Which was why it unnerved her now, to see him like this, polished and clean and nothing like her Abraham at all. "I don't like the tie," she told him bluntly. He frowned, standing. In two steps, he'd crossed the room and wrapped her in his arms.

"Why not?" He asked.

"It doesn't look like you," she said, her voice muffled in his chest. _Not the you I know_.

Abraham pulled away from her and grinned. "You're right." He tore the tie from around his neck and tossed it to the floor. "I hate these damn button shirts," he grumbled. "Think they'd kick me out if I turned up bare chested?"

Rosita laughed. "Yes."

"Might just do it anyway." He shuffled through the closet a bit, looking for something else, and pulled out a brown Polo shirt. "This do?"

Rosita pushed a stray strand of hair behind her ear. "Much better."

He nodded, satisfied, and made to change. Glancing up, he said, "I've never seen you in a dress before. You like nice." Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, "But I like the shorts better."

* * *

 **So that was different, and really fun, to write. Not a lot has been revealed about Rosita, so this was a good chance to explore her character a bit. The actress has said that she came from a family of men and lost her mother at a young age, so I incorporated that, but otherwise, I really just wanted to flesh her out a bit and see how she ended up where she did, with who she did. I hope she gets a bit more screen time in season 6 (9 days!) even if it means that this story is completely out of canon afterwards. I own nothing.**


End file.
